Up Close with Philip Holt

SPLYT Co Founder and CEO

Philip Holt spent the first 20 years of his career in video games, working as the general manager of EA Sports. Today, he uses that tech intellect and passion to change the way that software and application analytics are delivered, so that customers can feel empowered with the tools to understand their own audiences and then change and personalize their application to delight their users. The challenge that he, along with fellow SPLYT Co Founders Chris Staymates, V.J. LeBlanc and Jeremy Paulding, propose: “Shouldn’t software adapt to the person instead of the person adapting to the software?”

MONITOR, DIAGNOSE, CREATE

Software applications now have the ability to attract millions of users via the web or mobile devices. Yet, these audiences, made up of millions of people, are not homogenous. Rather, audiences are made up of unique individuals, each with individual interests, knowledge, and capability. The world makes software like Henry Ford made cars – mass-produced and distributed. We believe that software needs to do a much better job of recognizing and understanding unique audience members to deliver something personalized to them.

SPLYT customers can monitor whether the decisions they have made in building their websites or mobile apps are having positive or negative usage patterns with their audiences. This allows our customers to answer fundamental questions like “Are our users happy?” or “Are our users interacting with our software as we intended?” When our customers find an area of their application that isn’t behaving as they intended, they can quickly diagnose root causes, create experiments that modify their applications so they can test, and measure the impact of those changes before broadly deploying new versions of their user experience.

THE NEED FOR CONTEXT

Human intelligence is dependent on context to form new understanding. We judge new facts based on other things we know to be true. For example, if I told you two people each had $5 million and then asked you to assess which one of them is happier, you couldn’t. But if I told you that one of them had $1 million yesterday and the other had $10 million yesterday and today they both have $5 million, you could use that piece of context to assess the $5 million question.

The same thing is true with all forms of application data. We need context to judge facts and context in data is very difficult to generate. Most methods rely on manual creation of context, and because they are manual, they are incomplete and expensive. SPLYT has automated the discovery of context in data. The major benefit to that is we speed the entire process of generating insights from weeks to minutes and the process of changing applications from weeks to hours.

ORLANDO TECH COMMUNITY’S DNA

Orlando is a great place to live and work. There is a deep and wide talent pool with industry experience across simulation, data systems, user experience design, and analytics. The local universities generate a constant stream of new talent every year and the cost of living keeps our expenses down.

The Orlando Tech community, particularly the startup community in downtown Orlando, has really emerged in the last three years. This community is grassroots, organized, vibrant and growing, and has been a great place to find talent, partner with vendors and customers, and learn from each other.

Getting to revenue is a challenge for any business. The biggest thing the broader Orlando business community can do that will have major impacts on the entire region is to do business with startups. Helping to validate their product assumptions, provide real world use cases, be a reference for future customers, and provide much needed revenue are incredibly important.